


And The Things That Really Matter

by duointherain



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:36:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duointherain/pseuds/duointherain
Summary: Duo's Death... really. But he's forgotten. It's a bit rambly and poetic and ... Duo's also an alien.





	1. Chapter 1

And The Things That Matter

by Max

Disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing

Notes: Well, this went astray. It was supposed to be the tavern and Heero likes that Death walks in... 

 

The purpose of life is love. 

It isn’t the kind of love that mistakes another person for a fuck doll. Though the love that bends the known universe and the love a black lab puppy has for her chew toy are really only a matter of duration and intellect. 

Once there was a being who desired to live forever. He began in a body of atoms on a world of water that gave life as it flowed through the ripples of sheer being. He loved his mother and his father and his siblings. He loved his wife and later his husband, but always there was something just beyond today that he heard the call of. He learned to love the air and the sky and the void that lay beyond. 

He loved the worlds he swam on. He loved the different forms he learned to take. He laughed with poets on thousands of worlds. When death for all beings in his universe was voluntary, yet he lived on as friends of ten thousand years breathed through the final dream, he continued. 

There was always something beyond today. 

When the universe that had once held his mother’s beloved ocean cooled and slowed, suns flittering away like stale cookies, he lived. 

Then he heard the faintest cry coming from the depths of the blackest hole, reaching to him across the heaviest song of gravity and leaned in. Some part of his being, some strand in the fabric of his being woke and sung back to that voice. We are today. 

Through the darkness he swam, as if he were no more than a just hatched. He pushed and reached, gravity rippling through him as the water of life once had until he emerged into a world of metal and air. 

The voice came from a boy, barely hatched, but hatched into air. The beach of metal bore the echoes of many yesterdays, debris and radiation and death surrounded his blue-eyed, oh to skinny boy. He was the voice that had called, always though, always calling forward to tomorrow.   
And so he pulled atoms together enough. He had known and loved this kind of life before. So slow and cumbersome and too fragile in the water, always in the air, but for this voice he would wear this body. 

So there the blue-eyed barely alive baby lay at the feet of a slender figure, fingers like bones, pale grey to human eyes, form covered in billowing black silk that hooded his head and swirled at his ankles, almost a mist, pulling the stuff of life from this new universe that he did not, yet, know well enough. 

Tenderly, with the love that had called him across eons to this moment, this cry, he touched the baby boy’s face. In that touch, he learned what kind of being had summoned him, not all the stories of self that would be told, but the basics, the food and biology, and he knew that he could not know enough. The boy reaching for his fingers, trying to suckle them was not fully hatched. 

With new purpose he gently picked the being up, cradling him in arms that would never pass as human. “I am We,” he said, his first words with a human like mouth, moving air in a new to him universe. “We are. We Will.” 

And into the void he strode, through the thin lace walls of metal made by the hands of this young species. His blackness flowed around them both, warmth, air, and nurture. He walked until he found others of the boy’s kind. There were many of them in a larger basket of metal lace and air, living with many other species, so that it seemed like a healthy place for a barely hatched to be. And so he set the boy down, stronger now, healed, repaired to be stronger, smarter, kinder, than the malnutricion had left him. 

We also knew that he would need to learn the boy’s experience by living it as well, so he left that basket and walked until he found another group of the boy’s kind. This group had fewer newly hatched and many of them had disrepair that he did not understand. So he searched among them for a form that matched the voice he’d followed. 

The basket did not have as many species and he wasn’t sure that he liked it at all, until he found a very recently hatched boy in a flooded alveoli. His hair was long, flowing around him and it reminded We of his original form. When he touched the boy, he found him cold, but his open eyes were purple, like the night sky of his home, and he knew this him, this was he. So he pushed out the water from where it didn’t belong and sent electric back into the cells, the nerves, and repaired all the degradation. 

When he opened his eyes, pushing air over his tongue, out his nose, feeling it flow back in, like life, so like his home, his mother’s ocean, and he was home. “I am We,” he said in his small newly hatched human voice, “I am Duo.”

And he forgot that he was Death.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shinigami makes an appearance.

The Things that Really Matter 2/?  
by Max

 

Disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing. 

Note: This is going back to the Maxwell Church. 

Notes: I realize this is the prequel of Not Quite Single

 

“Uh.” More sigh then word, he sat on the wet ground, eons of memory and experience not really fitting in the head of a half starved two year old human child. He opened his mouth until his jaw hurt, from instincts held from some species that had never lived in this universe. 

At the edge of his being, the voice still called to him, but it faded with each breath his new body took. The center of the body started talking though and those words were pain. 

“Hey,” another voice said. 

“Hey,” he mimicked back. 

“Here,” the other kid said, offering him some brown square. “Want a cookie?”

“Want a cookie,” he mimicked again, trying to feel the language that went with the body. 

“Yeah,” the kid said before taking a bite, then handing the rest of the cookie to Duo. “Eat.”

His middle spoke again and he reached for the cookie with shaking little hands. His mouth only had a few teeth, but the cookie on his tongue was the best thing he could remember, the only thing he could remember as he chewed it. 

The other kid was bigger, still skinny, but older. “I’m Solo. What’cher name?”

“I am Duo,” he said, licking crumbs from his fingers. 

“Good. I got someplace warm. Wanna come?”

“Duo.”

“Yeah,” Solo said, holding out his hand. “Come on.”

He reached out for the other’s hand and it was like the call of the voice, but different. He felt like he’d come a very long ways, looking for things he hadn’t know, but as Solo’s hand closed around his, knowing the voice was near, he was home. This is what he’d longed for. Home. “Duo.”

<><><>

Older now, the journey of before forgotten, he coughed like his body was trying to turn itself inside out. He’d had bodies that could do that and the echoes of strange dreams ripped over him as precious food left his system. 

“Take a deep breath,” Solo said. “You gotta get yer throat ta relax so you don’t puke no more.”

Acid in the back of his throat, he coughed just a little more before wiping his mouth on the back of his arm. “Sowwy.” 

“Yer good,” Solo said, smiling, thin lips, dark circles under his eyes. The older boy leaned back on the pile of couch cushions they’d scavenged. It was almost a throne in the little group. “Yer smart. You can do anything, Duo. Don’t forget that.” 

“Yeah,” Duo said, taking a drink of water, “Tonight, we’ll hit the pharmacy. Get meds.” 

“Yeah,” Solo said curling on his side on the ruined cushions. “We’ll get some anti-virals.”

Duo snuggled up next to him, feeling happy that it was so warm with Solo’s arm over him. “Tell me the story about the little virus dots. Tell me about the rats.”

Solo coughed, arm tightening around Duo, pulling him close. “Not now. Ima sleep a little.”

Duo slept too. When he woke, Solo wasn’t warm anymore.

The air ocean didn’t move into him anymore, didn’t bring him life. 

Duo didn’t know what to do or what it meant, but deep in his soul, so deep that it felt eons away, a gentle touch brushed back tangled hair from his face. “Life doesn’t always last, but hold onto yours as long as you can.” 

Nose stuffy again, he sucked it back and wiped his arm over his face, smearing tears. 

<><>

The pharmacy wasn’t open at night, but Duo knew where it was. He and Solo had been planning on robbing it for weeks. First it had been about valuables to trade for food. Then when Mindy got sick, it was for medicine. 

Duo had dozens of ideas about how to do it. 

Solo had always nodded and engaged, but he didn’t think they could realy rob someplace that was guarded by Stradack-Winner Security. He’d died before he’d managed to explain that. 

Now there were three other of his group that were really hot like Solo had been. And so it was that a five year old Duo walked up to a pair of full grown and fully armored guards at the rear entrance of the pharmacy. He had no shoes, no visible weapons, and his hair was halfway to dreadlocks.

One of them lifted a face shield. “What the hell, kid? Go home.” 

“I am Duo. I want antivirals. Some are sick.”

“Kid, half the fucking colony has this shit. There aren’t enough anti-virals and no ship will dock until they’re for sure what the hell this is. You believe in Heaven?”

Duo felt like there was too much thinking in his head and it didn’t make sense. “What is Heaven?”

“It’s where people go when they die,” the guard said, bending over a little. “It’s like another colony, but real nice. Everyone has enough food and no one gets sick.”

“That sounds good,” Duo said, nodding. “I want to go there without dying.”

“You look like you’ll go soon,” the guard said, stepping back into place. “Go back to your friends kid. Tell’em Heaven is a great place.” 

Duo shook his head. In his head he felt like he was that last bit of water in a bottle as it emptied. “I want the medicine now.”

The other guard pulled a nightstick and gave Duo a fairly gently shove to the shoulder. “Get out of here, brat, or I’ll put you in the recycle where you belong.”

That was the last drop of water out of the bottle. Becoming Shinigami was like falling up, falling into a warm light. The thoughts of the guards filled the narrow back alley like krill for a whale, everywhere and so very nourishing. The billowing mantle of black silk night shifted, moving closer to his body as his body shifted to being much more human, though his face, still narrow and build on what Duo’s face would look like as an adult, still it was more skull than face. Voice deep and edged with a new kind of hunger, Shinigami purred. “Boku wa Shinigami da!”

Then they screamed. 

<><>

Duo ran down the service corridor, a heavy backpack full of medicine, food, clothes, and cookies on his back. At the right panel, he tapped the right sequence and was admitted. 

“I got it! I got it! We’re gonna be okay!”


	3. Cookie Locks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mercury has a bad day. Duo reads the Three Bears.

And The Things That Really Matter 3/?  
by Max

disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing

 

 

From the office one could see the stars and an interior view of the colony that was beautiful and green, lovely buildings and ample green spaces. Desperation was so far below the elegant office it might as well have been no more than a nasty virus, lurky, but latent in the beautiful colony. It was like a cancer that has already metastasized, but today is still for the catwalk and red soled shoes. 

Sante Marn stood by his window, half watching the world he governed, but half distracted by the images moving on a translucent screen that floated about shoulder height. The video came from someone in side the contracted security forces. He’d watched it a hundred times and each time a little more life came back into him. 

In the video, Duo transforms into Shinigami. Vibrant streams of green energy whips snapped, wrapping and slicing the unfortunate guards. As Shinigami turns to face the camera, almost as if he knows he’s being watched, Sante froze the frame, his finger tracing the edge of Shinigami’s face. “Dilectus,” he whispered in Latin, speaking it as it hadn’t been spoke in 2500 years, give or take. 

The sound of the door closing very gently drew his attention and he gestured the screen with Shinigami out of existence. 

A girl, late teens, pretty, conservative, wealthy, with the same dark brown eyes that Sante had, the same dark black silk hair, stood there in the simulated evening light. She held a pistol in her right hand, dark and heavy, hanging there like things they hadn’t said to each other. 

Sante smirked, an expression that made no attempt at all to look like the original. “Are you going to shoot me, Granddaughter?”

“You’re not my grandfather,” she said, her voice no steady than her rapidly beating heart. “People are dying. He never would have let that happen.”

Carefully controlling his expression, his body language, he said as if he were wiser than she, “I thought you were old enough to understand the real world, Anna. People die. It is how we control them.” 

She liked her lip nervously. The trigger felt slick under her finger. “I love you, Poppop.”  
Their eyes locked, milliseconds of calculating strategy. The movement of her arm, a motion so practiced, did not touch the rest of her body or her facial expression. She fired. Their eyes still locked, her energy packet went straight through his eye. Her face froze, lips parting in slow motion, color draining, as a thick silver syrup slipped like a great tear from where his eye had been. 

He smiled, a triumphant hunger glowing in his expression. “Surprise.”

“Demonio,” she hissed, making the sign of the cross with the pistol still in her hand. 

Over his desk with the grace of a panther, he was close to her, silver smeared face. Her breath held, heart nearly exploding, she wanted to back up, to run, but the fates had run out of thread for her. 

“I’m not a demon. I’m a god and I’m going to need your skin, my dear,” he purred, “You’ve done a lot of damage to this one, naughty girl.”

Her teeth chattered when she spoke. “Surprise.” Then she fired another energy bolt right up through her jaw and out the top of her head.

Her blood wasn’t silver. 

“Deodamnatus!” He howled. 

The power to his office blinked out. The displays in his windows gone, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized the windows had been sealed. All network connections were gone. The air held the very faintest tang of welding. Then the air flow stopped. 

“Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

The temperature dropped rapidly. He dropped the skin he’d been wearing like a wet bathrobe. “I am the god Mercury and I am going to kill each and everyone one of you.”

For the moment though, it was just him and the darkness. Outside of the walls they thought they could lock him in... there was another. There was another god. Shinigami. 

<><><>

In their cozy alcove, meant to be an air flow control, Duo and the smaller children sat in a circle. His cookie was on his knee, crumbs on his lips. He held up a book that he’d found in a children’s space in the pharmacy and pointed to a cartoon bear. “So this was the mama bear! She’s gonna make porridge.”

“What’s porridge,” Samantha asked, laying on her belly, chin in her palms, a stack of three cookies guarded between her elbows. 

Duo looked at the picture of brown stuff in a pot, nodded sagely. “It’s cookie soup. Very good.” 

“Can we make some?”

“When we get more cookies, and a pot,” Duo said, “The bears had a house, but it was like our house, hidden. So see, it says here,” Duo pointed to the words, “Goldilocks tasted the porridge, but it was too hot.” 

“Hot cookies! Can we make the cookies warm?”

“Sure,” Duo said, “After I get the warmer working again.”

“What kinda name is Goldilocks?”

“The name of a good thief,” Shen said. “Gold Locks. She’s stealing the cookies. She’s not as good as Duo though.” He took a bit of his cookie, just a little bite, as they had to make them last.

“Duo is Cookie Locks!” Samantha said enthusiastically.


End file.
